Festas da Lisboa | Lisbon Festivals

June is my favourite time of year to be in Lisbon… it´s the month in which the city dresses up and parties hard, the wine flows, the local party music drifts through the evening haze, carried along by the smoke of a hundred charcoal fires and the smell of sardines… delicious grilled sardines which, for me, is such a quintessentially Portuguese thing I don´t think I´d even be able to associate them with any other country.

The city of Lisbon is essentially like a bunch of small villages crammed together… there are residential areas tucked away in the middle of the city centre and once you´ve wandered far enough into any of them you almost forget that you´re in the middle of the capital. The little old ladies peer down at you from their windows and everybody knows everybody else, just like a small town… and it´s these small neighbourhoods that are the backbone of the Lisbon festivals, the heated competition between them to see who can throw the best party, who grills the best sardines, who has the most colourful decorations, is what brings the city to life.